A Different Approach to PvP

One thing that never sat well with me in CoX is how the feeling of playing a Hero and a Villain essentially felt the same. As a villain, you spent your time busting up snake dens and robbing banks. As a hero, you spent your time busting up gang dens and stopping bank robberies. And when it came time to PvP, it was usually a matter of going into a zone where PvP was turned on and working to fight the opposing side to control that zone. For reasons...I guess unknown?

The thing is that heroes and villains are inherently different characters, motivated by inherently different things. The preoccupation with making the experiences so similar and balanced detracts from immersion in the characters. If you're role-playing a hero, presumably you're interested in stopping criminals and villains from terrorizing your city, and generally keeping bad things from happening. If you're role-playing a villain, usually you're interested in furthering some self-centered goal, like amassing a fortune for yourself, or achieving world domination. I feel it's important to embrace these differences in the archetypes, especially in PvP, because it's mostly in the pursuit of these kinds of goals that heroes and villains should be in conflict with one another.

It's with these differences in mind that I want to suggest an idea for a two-tiered PvP system called "Taking A Stand" and "Calling 'Em Out".

TAKING A STAND (Heroes)
1) Villains would be given access to certain optional high-profile missions they could undertake, like breaking into a sealed vault, or creating a hostage situation in a ritzy penthouse. There would be significant trophies and/or rewards available for completing such missions without dying, or doing so within a strict time limit.

2) Heroes would be given access to a radio or police scanner which allows them to see a list of high-profile crimes being committed at any given time. Any hero with a scanner has the ability to claim one of these crimes and choose to "Take A Stand". In other words, they may enter into the instance and attempt to prevent the villain from accomplishing his goal. There would be significant trophies and/or rewards available for completing such missions

3) Villains would get a notification when a hero has chosen to Take A Stand against them so that they are aware another player has opted to interfere in their mission. The hero would get the opportunity to send a custom message to them, offering the villain "this ONE chance" to turn himself in.

4) From then on, the villain must continue to try his best to pull off his crime and, as a possible bonus, defeat the hero. The hero must try his best to prevent the same crime, either by defeating the villain or at least stalling him long enough to keep the crime from occurring.

5) The instance would end either with the villain accomplishing his goal and escaping, or with a final confrontation between the two for a little extra-tense PvP action.

CALLING 'EM OUT (Villains)
1) After a hero has chosen to Take A Stand against a specific villain, the two become enemies. From that point on, the villain, besides starting brand new high-profile missions, can also choose to "Call Out" one of his enemies. That is, he can start a mission with the understanding that the specific hero will be trying to intervene. The villain will be given the opportunity to send a message to the hero "Calling Him Out", taunting or goading him into stepping up in true villainous fashion. This would help facilitate rivalries between players on opposite sides, and role-playing.

2) The missions would function similarly to "Taking A Stand, although reversed, with the hero needing to accomplish an objective like rescuing a hostage or defusing a bomb, and the villain trying to stop it. There would again be a final escape or conflict at the end between the two players.

3) The more enemies a villain makes, the more heroes he can potentially Call Out into instances, rewarding consistent PvP activity with more PvP opportunities.

FINAL THOUGHTS
- NPCs would be involved in these missions on both sides, to give cannon fodder to both heroes and villains and make it a little more difficult for them just to harass each other endlessly during the mission.

- The PvP experience would be constantly building on itself for players that are interested in doing this. Heroes that are constantly Taking a Stand will find themselves getting Called Out more and more. Villains consistently running high-profile crimes will continue to make more enemies, and be able to Call Out more and more heroes.

- This experience facilitates the Heroes vs. Villains experience without the need for PvP fighting in the streets, or designated PvP zones with endless fighting in them.

- Both Taking A Stand and Calling 'Em Out can be tailored to group play easily by involving guilds. The end result would be contained battlegrounds of 4v4 or 5v5 superteams trying to accomplish a goal or prevent one from being accomplished with constant PvP mayhem.

- Punishment would exist for heroes that choose not to respond when Called Out. If a hero is Called Out and ignores it, they will be prevented from Taking A Stand for a period of time afterward. That way, they are encouraged to respond to their rivals, but only if they are actually invested in PvP. For heroes that are not interested in playing this aspect of the game as much, the punishment would not affect them in any other area of play.

- To prevent spamming and harassment, if a hero chooses not to respond to a specific villain's Call three consecutive times, they will be removed from that villain's enemies list and will no longer be able to be called out by that villain.

- Vigilantes can also opt to be involved on either side of this system, depending on their character and preferences.

And that's it! Any other thoughts or ideas? Any support for this sort of a system? I think this would help fold PvP into the game as a whole, something MMOs are not particularly amazing at, and give City of Titans a unique way of presenting PvP.

The only significant changes I might make is to give the villain a chance to initiate a rivalry as well, perhaps heroes have a mission to save the hostages and capture a mutagen that a mad scientist was going to test on them, but a villain can enter and attempt to steal the mutagen while the hero is busy rescuing the hostages, placing the hero on an effective time-limit.

On the other hand, requiring the Villain to act, and the Hero to react could also significantly affect the "flavor" of the different options, and is some ways keep with traditional narrative structures in some ways.

Balancing it against the possibility of griefing/abusing level difference would be the only major issue I could see with this.

I like this idea, you seem to have put a lot of solid though into it.
The only significant changes I might make is to give the villain a chance to initiate a rivalry as well, perhaps heroes have a mission to save the hostages and capture a mutagen that a mad scientist was going to test on them, but a villain can enter and attempt to steal the mutagen while the hero is busy rescuing the hostages, placing the hero on an effective time-limit.
On the other hand, requiring the Villain to act, and the Hero to react could also significantly affect the "flavor" of the different options, and is some ways keep with traditional narrative structures in some ways.

The intention is that villains would be able to instigate by constantly being involved in eye-catching high-profile crimes, but the point you make about "flavor" is exactly in line with what I'm going for. Making the experience more authentic for both sides is the ultimate end-game here.

Sand_Trout wrote:

Balancing it against the possibility of griefing/abusing level difference would be the only major issue I could see with this.

CoX was always really good about balancing levels in areas like this. Would be nice if CoT could manage something similar. Or, just keep people from Calling Out those that are more than a level or two underneath them. That would preemptively resolve the problem.

dawnofcrow wrote:

i see bounty hunting in CoT

I don't? Bounty Hunting is really only prevalent in games, like EVE which you linked, where Bounty Hunting is a feasible profession. As this game is focused more on superheroes, it seems like such a system would require a ton of work to implement without too much payoff, since few characters would believably be involved in such a profession. Did you have more to elaborate on that?

masterghostartist wrote:

i can see trash talking and such leading up to a arena bout. let us put down bets on the fight..... let it have a time table a week long. prepare for a event.

Trash talking and preparation would all be part of the fun when you get into regular group vs. group scenarios. The important thing is that like-minded people can find each other, so groups that enjoy that sort of thing can play with one another. You just don't want unwanted harassment to be an unavoidable part of play.

hmmm. might need a new type of class.
the agent. a sort of ingame version of a wrestling talent agent. that would be interesting as a class.
have a federation of people, of supergroups,not just 100 random people here and there. going to need ingame billbaords that can handle scanned art for bigger matches.......
lol. i wonder is cable television would take interest?

I had the seeds of a similar idea but as I don't really PvP much I couldn't really articulate it as well as the OP.
I like this idea.
It could be expanded on to include whole teams of heroes and villains.

This could easily be translated to groups, by either tailoring the police scanner to only search for similar-sized teams as the one you are currently in, or by allowing supergroups to challenge one another once their members have become enemies.

If a villain has a bad enough rep, why wouldn't there be a bounty placed on them.

Because the system under discussion doesn't necessarily allow for overlap in play between heroes and villains. In CoX, heroes and villains leveled separately and could not be a part of each other's game except in designated areas. I know we're still not 100% on where CoT stands on this, but the system proposed in this thread only allows for overlap in these very specific missions and instances. It would therefore not necessarily allow a player to go into areas of the city where they might track a villain outside of the instances. That would require a commitment to overlap between the tracks, and a completely different bounty system entirely.

Unless you're just proposing that, if a villain has caused enough damage, that heroes could be encouraged to "Take A Stand" against him specifically for a greater payoff. That would be a way to fold bounties into this system as proposed.

I do believe Warcabbit mentioned in a few interviews that they are considering a similar system of Arch-rival PvP. But I would not include a personal message, because some people will use it to text profanity to their opponent, and if they kill you, you will be t-bagged and more profanity will ensue as they rejoice over your corpse.

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"If people say it can't be done, then you're on the right path."Comic Book Lead

1) This is an interesting and creative idea, but the initial release of the game will probably have several powers that need to be rebalanced for pvp. It would be easier to get information needed to rebalance by starting with a simply free-for-all pvp before adding additional complexity.
2) If this were the only form of pvp then you would have to wait until an appropriate villain or hero was available to battle. That sounds boring.

All I want from PvP is a self flagging faction system where you can flag for PvP and unplug for PvE while out of combat. The Flags will come in three types (lets say Red, Yellow and Blue) and you can flag for the Red Faction and it will allow you to attack Yellow and Blue flagged players in open world settings.

Again you can change your flag or completely unflag at any moment.

If this and only this concession is in the game for PvP (no games, no arenas, no duels..) then I will be a happy man. I loved it in Wildstar but I hated that I couldn't choose my faction because of the game's race systems. Just let the players decide what "open world PvP" means to them and I'll be happy.

I can't go into details, but the way we will have pvp set up, pvpve isn't going to be something we will have in general, certainly not at launch. If and when we can implement pvpve, it will be in specifically set not an everywhere kind of thing.

PvP will always be clearly defined and voluntary. We aim to make the rules between the two as seamless as possible to prevent learning two ways to play as a barrier of entry. In the instance that a power must behave differently we can set up separate versions of the power. If we are successful in our power building systems this shouldn't be necessary. However if the core function of a power is the problem one one area, it's probably an issue in the other and in this instance, any changes made would effect both pvp and pve.

PvP definitely has to be voluntary. But I would want the same system for PvE as PvP. It was crazy how the two diverged in CoH.

I know this would be difficult, especially for mez effects. But I think it would also mean those mez effects could be made to make more sense. Eg. everyone should be knocked back at times, when the blow is strong enough, just that melee-specific characters learn how to usually minimize that; but sometimes they still get knocked back. And you can have more nuances, like a mez strength against a mez resistance, leading to a transition from slow to immobilize to hold.

Super Bases were not intended to be RP havens, they were intended to be player created super group headquarters, where PvP would be either a villain SG would break into a hero SG Super Base or vice versa. But. Sadly, NCSoft made it too difficult to get a good starter PvP Super Base, henceforth, nobody did it, and the Super Bases became creative player, play grounds.

Another problem that faced bases-as-combat-zones was that designing the building blocks and base pieces to be usable without looking silly in "optimal" combat configurations proved intractable, from my understanding. In order to have combat be possible, rather than bases being genuinely impenetrable (and boring) kill zones, they would have had to greatly restrict the freedom to build and design.

We're examining this problem to see what we might be able to do differently.

I don't do PVP. I will not do PVP under any circumstances whatsoever. There is absolutely nothing that can entice me into PVP.

Whatever you do with PVP, just please make sure it's optional. If I can be forced into PVP, I will not play this game. There needs to be a setting to permanently opt out so I won't be constantly having to refuse challenges.

I liked working on my base. It was a fun creative outlet and whenever I could, I'd let other players see my base. They always thought it was cool. I Do Not want my base attacked, Ever. If my base can be attacked I won't bother building one. Why would I?

The usual post about the usual PVP conundrum:
1. There will be PVP of some kind and PVE.
2. There will be super powers.
3. Some people want all the powers to work the same in both instances.
4. Certain types of powers (mez effects for one) are totally overpowered in PVP due to the fact that they totally shut down a player, making them incapable of reacting or moving but still able to take damage.
5. PVPers want enjoyable PVP, not a frustrating mezfest.
6. PVEers want the PVE part of the game not to be rules tweaked for the sake of the PVP part. (as in "Why does my one blast power do less damage after the last patch? Because they had to nerf it for PVP reasons. What?!?!?").

This is akin to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's a problem with so many mutually-exclusive parameters that something somewhere has to give. Historically, the "Make the powers work the same in PVP as they do in PVE." thing is basically impossible all by itself let alone with any other constraints you try to impose, so that's the first one out the door.

Scenario 1:
- Controller was perched up high in a PvP zone.
- Stalker pounces on Controller, taking 75% Health off Controller. (Assassins Strike should never take more than 20 - 30% HP (without buildup or the like) while in PvP)
- Controller use Mezz power on Stalker
- Stalker is Held for 10 Seconds, because 1st Application has Higher Mezz. Subsequent applications stack, but allot less effective in PvP.
- Controller runs away while Stalker is Mezz'd.

In a drawn out Battle over a minute or so, the Stalker should win. Controllers should not be allowed to win in a drawn out battle One to One.
But Controllers need to be given a Way Out to retreat if so desired.

Well, thats as strong a Mezz that should be allowed in PvP... as i see it. Only after 3 full minutes of a drawn out fight and many Hold applications, should a Scrapper be Held for more than 10 seconds.

You just have to find a way to Explain why Holds dont work as well when in PvP. Maybe an experimental Serum was developed by a evil Scientist that reduces a few Mezz effects?!
Maybe it wears off after 10 minutes, maybe its permanent, maybe it falls off as time goes by, maybe it has a few side effects depending on your bodys makeup (in this case Archetype) .. not sure right now. :P

Point being... If Controller stays... and tries to go toe to toe, One on One, against the stalker.. Stalker almost always wins! Controllers only option should be a way to just Slow the Stalker down.

If the Controller flees and battle ends... but the Stalker peruses again, the Controllers 1st time Hold is reset and will Hold for the Stalker again a whole 10 seconds.. and the cycle repeats, until the Stalker realizes s/he cant really win using that tactic.

Izzy, all that does is reinforce that Damage Is King without admitting that AoE Wears The Crown. Why? Because Damage is the ONLY way to "win" and everything else is just a delaying action to prevent "winning" in some form or fashion.

In other words, there needs to be alternative Defeat Conditions available beyond just HP reduced to zero.

Note that Hold and Sleep were the two mez effects that prevented Actions from occurring. Likewise, Confuse prevented a Foe from attacking you, although they could still attack their former allies (hence the double no damage requirement).

Now you've suddenly got a situation where Mez Can Win without requiring Damage as the only possible Victory Condition. The presumption here is that if you've got a Foe either Held, Slept or Confused (and not fighting YOU) for X/Y seconds, then it ought to be "a piece of cake" to Arrest them in a more permanent fashion (ie. Defeat) ... provided you're not taking any damage during that time frame yourself (ie. there's no real Threat).

Set X and Y to be whatever Playtesting tells you is reasonable (I'm thinking 30 to 60 seconds) and off you go.

Note that if you create a system like this, where Mez Can Defeat if it isn't interrupted, you can have "Controllers" who do very little damage ... because they're Defeating their Foes without applying DAMAGE to them. This would essentially be building game mechanical recognition that Perma Mez Can Win.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

I've been wondering myself on "alternative defeat conditions". I don't have an extremely strong feeling one way or the other.. but if it worked it'd be cool to see "Defeat" for reaching a Mez or even a Threat threshold.

Slight derail but a topic I'd like to hear more on.

One thing is sure.. all conditions need to be qualitative and not quantitative just as HP systems are.

I've been wondering myself on "alternative defeat conditions". I don't have an extremely strong feeling one way or the other.. but if it worked it'd be cool to see "Defeat" for reaching a Mez or even a Threat threshold.
Slight derail but a topic I'd like to hear more on.
One thing is sure.. all conditions need to be qualitative and not quantitative just as HP systems are.

Guess I'll just make a new topic for it then.

—

Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

The usual post about the usual PVP conundrum:
1. There will be PVP of some kind and PVE.
2. There will be super powers.
3. Some people want all the powers to work the same in both instances.
4. Certain types of powers (mez effects for one) are totally overpowered in PVP due to the fact that they totally shut down a player, making them incapable of reacting or moving but still able to take damage.
5. PVPers want enjoyable PVP, not a frustrating mezfest.
6. PVEers want the PVE part of the game not to be rules tweaked for the sake of the PVP part. (as in "Why does my one blast power do less damage after the last patch? Because they had to nerf it for PVP reasons. What?!?!?").
This is akin to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's a problem with so many mutually-exclusive parameters that something somewhere has to give. Historically, the "Make the powers work the same in PVP as they do in PVE." thing is basically impossible all by itself let alone with any other constraints you try to impose, so that's the first one out the door.

As long as the mechanics stay the same that is acceptable. Things in the line of power x does not that much damage in PVP since it can be abused to spike your opponent far to efficiently or power y gets a longer cooldown or shorter duration because it could lock a player in a hold.

But things like power z summons a minion in PVE, which proved to be to strong, so it gets changed to a ranged attack would be too much.